Drops of Awesome

Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson

Archives for August 2009

Weathermen are Sinister

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I’m not talking about The Weathermen, although bombing public places is also sinister. I’m talking about the men and women who predict the weather and then talk about it on television. I’m talking about exhibitionist meteorologists.

These people are way too excited about carnage-inducing destructive weather patterns. During the heat wave, you could tell that from their air-conditioned studios it was the best week of the year to date. They got top billing on all the advertisements leading up to the news that night. Then they got to pop in throughout the broadcast dribbling out bits of weather information with a wink and a grin and the infamous, “Is this heat wave EVER going to end? I’ll tell you coming up later in the broadcast.” (As though maybe it wouldn’t ever end and if you didn’t watch, then surely it wouldn’t.)

And if a heat wave is good for business, the windstorm 2 years ago was probably the single best thing to ever happen to Seattle weather people. Sadly, most of their viewers were without cable or power so they had to take to the radio, offering up their cheerful gloom and doom without the inconvenience of makeup or wardrobe or having to stand outside wherever the weather was most severe, pointing to cars, ACTUALLY IN THE PROCESS OF BEING SMASHED BY TREES, while trying to look like they felt bad about the occupants.

When the big much-anticipated earthquake hits the Northwest and their weather reports are picked up by the national news organizations, I think their heads will explode.

I don’t blame them. It’s their job. They have the blood of newsmen running through their veins and we all know how the news industry works. The greater the destruction, carnage or pain, the greater your audience, the higher your ratings and the more money you make.

Even as a not news person, I’ve sure gotten a lot of mileage telling stories of the Big Freeze or the Catastrophic Wind Storm or the Flood of Oh-Six. Stories of peril and narrow escapes are the stuff of good drama. I think we all enjoy being the news anchors of destruction from time to time, which is possibly what makes this sketch so funny to me. Then again, maybe it’s just the eyebrows.

I love how it doesn’t matter on local news if they have any information to share. It WILL NOT STOP THEM FROM TALKING. They say things like, “We have a situation here and what we do know is that an incident has occurred,” and gesturing over to the meteoric inferno of emergency vehicle lights, “The police action appears to have occurred over in that region there where you see those lights.”

On Friday night in Seattle all the network stations were hi-jacked by news people anxious to share the details, of which there were none, with the citizens of the Puget Sound area. Two men had been shooting guns and running across a major freeway. By the time I caught up with the Breaking News, both suspects were in custody and the reporters were at that awkward place where they start interviewing every person within a 3-mile radius about the event and asking them what they think might have happened, even if they were unaware of the incident until the cameras and lights clamped on their faces.

Which direction did the men come from? How tall were they? What were their names? If you can’t release their names, then just tell us what their mothers would say if they wanted to call them in to dinner. Were they shooting at the nearby college? You don’t know? If you had to guess, would you venture to say that they had been shooting at the nearby colleges? (Shooting by colleges is much more tragic than, say, random drunken shooting in the woods.)

I kept waiting for them to get back to the regularly scheduled programming but eventually decided to play a little Dr. Mario with Dan before bed. It’s fun. Nobody gets hurt and it causes my little giant baby oven to contract. All good things. None of them news-worthy. I guess that’s why I need a blog.

Slave Labor from My Pregnant Perch

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I’m not much for cleaning these days. I’m much for eating and sleeping and going to water aerobics with elderly women. Because I don’t feel like cleaning, I rarely make the kids do it either. When they clean, it basically means I have to clean and coax and supervise them while they whine about the difficulties inherent in being born a Thompson.

[Read More at Parenting.com]

Craigslist Gives Me Melon-Feet

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I love the idea of Craiglist. You sell things. You buy things. You give away things so that people will haul them away from your house for free. I have been able to give things away on Craigslist that no one on Freecycle was willing to take from me. In theory, Craigslist is just a hands-down all-round super-awesome idea. It has one major flaw that I can see though – People use it.

Yes. When you’re buying and selling on Craigslist, you have to deal with People and People are sometimes flakey and overly picky and sometimes they don’t tell the whole truth about the whole everything. I know this. I have years of experience both dealing with and being People.

The last time I put something up for free on the List O’Craig, I had about 20 people ask to come by for it. I began trying to give it away on a first come, first served basis but the first people to respond were not necessarily the first ones who could come by and even when they said they’d stop by, they often didn’t. So for days, I’d tell one person they could come get it, we’d set up a time, I’d wait at home and they’d not show up. This happened several times so that when I finally got rid of the darn futon, I was thanking the taker PROFUSELY for actually showing up to get the free furniture.

So now I’m a shopper. I’m looking for baby stuff. My MacLaren Quest Stroller of Bliss and Joy that I’ve had and loved for the past 6 years molded and mildewed in my garage over the winter and so I want a new one without paying for a NEW one to the tune of $220. My infant seat has expired and although I’m not sure I believe in expiration dates on car seats, I have enough doubt in my heart that I would blame myself if we got in an accident with the old seat and the baby was injured in any way.

So I found a top consumer reports car seat on Craigslist that was 6 months old and in “perfect condition” from a non-smoking, pet-free home and the woman swore it had never been in an accident. Since Dan does not believe in expiration dates on car seats, he was much more amenable to my spending $85 on Craigslist than $200 at Babies R Us for the infant seat.

However, the day before I was to pick up the seat, the woman emailed me to say her child was still using it and it wasn’t really available yet until she got him the bigger seat. Okay. So it was on Craiglist but not really for sale yet. She apologized and said if I could wait a week, she’d have it ready. This went on for a few weeks when finally she emailed to say she’d purchased her new seat and I could come pick it up.

Not wanting me to come to her home, she asked me to meet her at a grocery store 35 minutes from my house at 6pm as a celebration of cranky hungry kids and rush hour. I told her I could come at 6:30 and she said that by 6:30 she’d be at her church for an event. She told me to meet her there, gave me directions and said to call her on her cell phone when I got close. Well her church was 40 minutes away and it was still rush hour but I packed my kids in the car and drove out to meet her.

The directions were wrong and after driving around for a while I found it anyway because it was a super giant mega-church, having a humongous concert of some kind with a full stage and lighting set up in the parking lot and hundreds, if not thousands of people in the audience. All the parking was full. People were walking from blocks and blocks away to hear the music. I was getting concerned about how I was going to find her and whether I’d have to drag my two kids and my crippled pregnant body for blocks and blocks to the concert and then blocks and blocks back to her car and then blocks and blocks back to my car so I called her.

And it went straight to voicemail again and again and again. I left her some choice messages, sort of polite in a biting sort of let-me-describe-in-detail-all-the-ways-you’ve-put-me-out sort of way and I teared up a little and headed 30 minutes from there to Babies R Us to buy the dang car seat new so I would never have to deal with People again, only sales associates.

To her credit, she called a couple of hours later to apologize and say she’d left her cell phone at home by accident. I could not bring myself to say, “It’s okay,” or do anything to really make her feel better. My feet were swollen. My people were cranky and we’d spent 3 hours about town in rush hour traffic on a wild goose chase. I told her I was frustrated. I told her I’d used half a tank of gas for no reason. I told her I never planned on using Craiglist again. I wished her luck selling the seat and I hung up.

Strangely, making her feel bad did not make me feel better at all. I still had melon feet. My kids were still mad and I was still out $200 bucks, a tank of gas, and a few ounces of sanity, only now I also felt guilty. I could have let her off the hook. I could have not spent the entire drive telling my kids to be quiet because I was busy talking to Dad, Grandma and my sisters about what a total jerk-wad this lady was on my Bluetooth. I would have liked them to have seen me be a bigger person than that. I would have liked to have played 20 questions or listened to Eye of the Tiger and I would have liked to have remembered that I’ve stood people up before, forgotten my cell phone or just gone temporarily brain dead.

But I still kind of loathe Craigslist.

Now tell me. Do you believe in car seat expiration dates?

Oh MAN!

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I fluffed some stuffed animals and placed them in her crib just for the effect when she sees it for the first time. I know little babies are not supposed to sleep with a bunch stuff in their cribs until they’re much older and that they’re supposed to sleep on their backs and be bathed just enough but not too much and not eat solid foods or drink alcohol in their bottles for the first few weeks of life. As I was putting the freshly-ironed curtains up on the rod, I heard the kids start again.

[read more at Parenting.com]

Snarky and Clueless

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Sometimes I wonder when they will get a clue. I already know the answer but I ask it hypothetically to the universe in general and to my husband specifically. “WHEN WILL THEY GET A CLUE?!”

The answer is – 20 years from now when they have kids of their own and suddenly realize that I wasn’t just nagging them for my own amusement but was trying to teach them to be responsible citizens and often because I actually needed their help.

Today was a day spent working, working and being in pain, working and being in pain and begging, sometimes yelling at my kids to help me just the tiniest bit. I wasn’t asking them to polish the silver or wax the floors or give me a mani-pedi while I watched soaps. I was feeling the shooting pains as my ligaments pulled and expanded, limping on hips and a pelvis that may not hold up much longer under this kind of pressure, gagging with a sudden resurgence of morning sickness and working my butt off to clean the house. I was asking them to pick up their ratchen fratchen toys that covered the entire main floor. I was repeating myself over and over until even I was sick of the sound of my own voice.

At some point in the afternoon I considered changing Magoo’s name to some glass-shattering word from the mermaid dialect, anything that would cause him to show the slightest sign that he could hear it as it was coming out of my mouth. He is completely deaf to the sound of my voice unless my voice is whispering sweet nothings about chocolate, gummy worms or time for game play on the Wii.

But if I’m calling him, even yelling from as little as 3 feet away, he bounces along playing and making strange little man noises, giving me no notice at all. It seems like the worse I feel, the worse the deafness gets.

Laylee, on the other hand was willing to work on and off with very little coaxing or threatening but seemed intent on bullying and tormenting Magoo as she went, causing him to bawl and collapse and then come running to me once he’d regained his strength. I took my frustration out on them and they took theirs out on each other. It was a lovely afternoon.

Then Dan came home exhausted from work and I complained and whined and tattled on them like a spoiled child. So he took them off to bed. Last I heard, someone was crying. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Dan and I’m pretty sure it was in response to something like the threat of no stories if they didn’t pick up the pace a bit.

It’s days like this that make me glad we can reset overnight and start fresh in the morning. And maybe I won’t wake up 4 times tonight. And maybe I’ll feel better in the morning. And maybe they’ll decide they like me and each other. And maybe I just remembered there’s a chocolate bar in my purse. And maybe I’m done blogging now.

Pigs and Robots are Smart

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Dinner. Tonight. Canned soup. Crackers. Cold cereal for desert. Best dinner conversation in possibly the last 2 years.

Dan was at a meeting. I managed to find some canned soup that was less than 2 years past its Best-By Date. I warmed it in the microwave and we sat down to chow. Each kid counted out 10 Better Cheddars to eat with their soup. Laylee thought it was okay to eat but not much to look at.

Magoo thought it was disgusting unless I fed it to him spoon by spoon like a little influenza patient from the olden days where influenza would likely kill you if someone didn’t sit by your bed spooning broth into your pie hole.

“I want to eat it like a robot,” Magoo began. “Robots are really smart and they can look like they’re made out of bottles.”

“Oh yeah?” Laylee chimed in, “Well pigs are really really smart. I’m gonna eat my crackers like a pig.”

Both kids started snarfing crackers like a couple of rabid hogs and I let them with some bland statement about how I was glad they weren’t doing that in front of anyone else because we at least wanted to pretend that being a Thompson meant you had polite table manners. I’m not sure if they heard me over the snorting, chomping and laughing.

I’ve been a little nostalgic lately about the fleeting nature of childhood and putting up with perhaps more than I should because seeing little kids and imagining that I’ll soon be done with them makes me a cry a little in public sometimes. I can chalk the public crying up to being pregnant and no one seems to mind, especially since they don’t have to witness what kind of heathen dinner habits the crying leads to once I get home.

I told Laylee I didn’t think pigs were really that smart. Besides Wilbur, I told her that I thought most pigs were kind of dumb.

But she knew different. Ms. Sweetsie had read her a book about pigs in kindergarten and how they were creatures of untold genius. She said she wished she had a brain like a pig.

“But I’m a robot,” argued Magoo, seeming to say that the two could not coexist at the same dinner table.

I continued to feed him and he continued to talk about robots between bites.

Laylee said that pigs were so smart that they could probably use their hooves (she illustrated these by clamping her hands into tight fists) to pick flowers in the meadow if they wanted to. She mimed the action of picking flowers sans-phalanges.

“That’s why I want a pig’s brain.”

“Do you like the soup?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s great.”

“It’s good if you chew it like a robot.” Magoo demonstrated what mechanical soup chewing would look like.

“If it were ever really cold in the winter and my hands froze until they were black and we had to cut them off so I had no hands at all, I’d need to have a brain as good as a pig so I could still pick flowers in the meadow.” Again she mimed the two-fisted flower picking. “That would be really cool.” Slurp.

“Yes. That would be very fortunate,” I responded.

Nope. I’m Not Having Twins.

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Yep. I’m sure.

Last week I had 11 people ask me this. Most were strangers. They were serious. A few were friends. I think it was an attempt at commiseration.

At one point I was walking through the swimming pool dressing room fully clothed when I heard someone yell out to me from the other side of the room, “You’re about ready to pop, eh?” I turned around. When you look like me and someone yells something like that from 50 feet away behind your back, you know they’re talking to you.

“Yep.”

“I bet you get sick of hearing that.”

“Yep. Especially since I’m not due for another 6 weeks.”

“Oh HONEY!”

Indeed. Honey-child. Sistah-friend. GIRRRLLL. I am large and whale-like.

She told me I looked great, which I decided to believe because when someone is looking at you with pity and telling you how fabulous you look, they have to be telling the truth, right? Honestly. I feel cute when I’m pregnant. My body shapes itself in a way that announces our upcoming joy and sleepless nights and doesn’t leave anyone any room to wonder if I’m just packing away too many Peanut Butter Twix bars.

So it seems that the physical therapy and water exercise are paying off. I feel less like the lower half of my body is being snapped in pieces and more like a late-term pregnant woman, experiencing late-term pregnancy “discomfort.” It’s been a huge improvement.

In exciting news, it looks like this baby’s big like Fat Boy Magoo. At my last appointment she was measuring about 5 lbs by ultrasound and if she follows the trends and doubles in weight the last 6 weeks… OUCH! So the doctor plans to take her a week early! This thrills me. The last two times my due date just meant the date where I’d start asking for an induction and waiting with even more impatience.

Now I have a cut-off date in my head that makes the last minute antsyness and uncomfortability more bearable. We spent some time today looking at pictures of the other two when they were fresh and new and I can’t wait to meet little Wanda.

Hopefully we’ll find her a real name in the next month.